Is the AfD Crypto-Fascist? No More Than Republicans Are

Investigating the case for banning or isolating Germany's allegedly extremist party

Last week, JD Vance caused a stir at the Munich Security Conference in a speech that ignored security issues and instead lectured Europeans on their internal politics, namely the suppression of speech and mass migration. He took the German political class in particular to task for shutting out Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which the other major parties refuse to form coalitions with at the local and national levels. In a multiparty democracy with more than two competitive parties that means that it is in effect rendered powerless, in Vance’s view robbing its voters of representation.

The media has raised a ruckus over this. On Sunday, CBS anchor Margaret Brennan lectured Marco Rubio on how Germany was a country in which “free speech was weaponized to commit a genocide.” That same night, 60 Minutes did a generally sympathetic feature on speech restrictions in Germany. The AfD is consistently referred to as something of a fascist or Nazi-adjacent party in the American media, with the implication that it would be crazy to allow it to have political power in the nation that gave the world the Holocaust. After the segment with Rubio aired, Brennan tweeted out a link to an ADL article on the AfD that lists the usual charges.

The AfD of course does not call itself a Nazi or fascist party. It doesn’t advocate the Hitlerian goals of invading Poland, union with Austria, or eliminating the Jews from public life. Here is its 2025 party platform, which I had ChatGPT summarize in English.

AFD 2025 Platform, ChatGPT English summary

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The AfD calls for cutting taxes, ending state subsidies for renewable energy, and bringing back nuclear power. It wants more deportations, to limit immigration, and to restrict social benefits given to non-citizens. It opposes quotas and gender identity. Typical right-wing stuff, none of it particularly shocking.

The argument against granting the AfD a seat at the table, however, is that they are crypto-fascists. According to this view, secretly the party is full of people sympathetic to extremist ideas, who would enact racist and anti-democratic policies if given the opportunity.

When first coming across this argument, I was skeptical. I’m familiar with the idea of dog whistling from American politics. One of the most famous alleged cases in recent American history is Ronald Reagan’s 1980 speech near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the city where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Reagan’s supposed crime was invoking the concept of states’ rights. He had good reason to campaign in Mississippi during an election year, as it was then a swing state. The idea that he wanted to associate his campaign with the murder of three civil rights workers seems unlikely, and states’ rights was a normal part of his messaging, so I tend to think there was nothing there. As a general matter, liberals of that era would denounce the Republican “Southern strategy” as a way to keep racial issues focused on the questions of 1964 while ignoring that there were legitimate criticisms individuals could have about later developments in civil rights policy like affirmative action and school busing. Rather than acknowledge anyone could disagree with the left on racial issues for good faith reasons, Democrats and the media pretended as if the only way a politician would support states’ rights was if he wanted to appeal to the prejudices of Klansmen.

That said, crypto-politics is a real phenomenon. Germany has hate speech laws, so you can’t be an openly fascist or Nazi party. Already, the AfD has faced quite a bit of legal trouble. This means that it makes sense that a fascist party might dog whistle to its base, assuring all the Nazis out there that it is on their side, while hopefully being able to win over more moderate voters and avoiding the state coming after it.

What Does It Mean to Be a Crypto-Fascist Party?

Before we get to the case against the AfD, it’s useful to step back and think carefully about what we are asking. The reason that the AfD finds itself under legal suspicion is that the German constitution bans “anti-democratic” parties in Article 21, Section 2.

Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.

Yet if you read the arguments against the AfD, there aren’t many serious allegations that it wants to actually abolish democracy. Rather, the focus is overwhelmingly on members’ views towards national identity and immigration, and their lack of repentance over the Nazi past. This may seem strange as someone could theoretically want to deport all immigrants and think Hitler should be honored while trying to accomplish such goals through normal democratic processes. Regardless of how words are defined in other countries, such views themselves are “anti-democratic” under current German law. In 2017, the Federal Constitutional Court declared that the National Democratic Party (NDP) could be banned due to its advocating for a racially defined ethnic community (Volksgemeinschaft), which threatened the free democratic order, although it refrained from allowing authorities to do so on the grounds that the NDP wasn’t actually powerful enough to threaten democracy.

The real concern with the AfD, then, is that it is a fascist or fascist-adjacent party, if we grant in theory that it is possible that there can be a definition of fascism that preserves the political rights of its opponents. In defining these terms, we cannot use them to refer to right-wing positions that it shares with other conservative parties. AfD’s stated policy goals do not include much that even a non-MAGA Republican would disagree with, and unless you want to go down the route of calling all conservatives fascists, there must be something else there.

I think any definition we have of what it means to be a fascist party is going to be unsatisfactory. In the German context, we can mean something along the lines of believing in an ethnic conception of nationhood and emphasizing a collective destiny over individual liberty or utilitarian reasoning. Moreover, I’d say that while fascist and fascist-adjacent groups share similarities with conservatives on topics like immigration, gender roles, and national identity, the former are a lot more extreme on these issues and place a higher priority on them. Opposition to immigration is a spectrum, from wanting no more newcomers, to calling for deporting non-citizens, to favoring deporting citizens for being of the wrong racial or cultural background. Right-wing extremists are usually hostile to free speech when they’re in power, yet given the way Germany prosecutes people for views that would be protected in other countries, the AfD’s opponents have lost the moral high ground on that.

Once we’ve defined fascist, or come as close as we’re going to get, we can ask what it means for a party to be crypto-fascist. Here there are two possibilities,

1. The leadership of the party is itself fascist, but has to hide it. Upon achieving power, the worry is that they will take the mask off and implement fascist policies.

2. The party contains many people who are fascists and who see the party as a tool to achieve their ends.

Each one of these definitions has many gradations within it. The leadership of a party can be completely fascist, or a combination of fascists and non-fascists. But it’s nonetheless worth keeping these distinctions in mind as we go forward. Defenders of the AfD point out that its leader is Alice Weidel, a lesbian in a civil union with a Sri Lankan woman. This fact makes (1) less likely, but doesn’t have much bearing on whether (2) is true.

Someone might reasonably argue that the difference between (1) and (2) isn’t all that important. If you’re distressed about the possibility of fascism coming back to Germany, then even if the leadership of the AfD is mostly full of classical liberals, you have to worry that they give problematic actors a seat at the table, and such individuals may eventually gain the upper hand. A lot of mainstream Republicans saw Trump as someone they could control during his first term, but he has since achieved complete dominance of the party and sidelined any opposition to himself or his agenda. The Nazis themselves started out in a coalition with other right-wing parties before pushing their allies aside. And, as discussed below, we’ve even seen this in the history of the AfD itself, where nationalists have gained control at the expense of the neoliberals.

Alice Weidel with her partner Sarah Bossard

That being said, we can question whether it is workable to go around banning every political party that has a faction of extremists within it. In Germany, other parties are often willing to form alliances with Die Linke, which is descended from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) — the ruling communist party of East Germany. The German Green Party, part of the current ruling coalition, is significantly influenced by the ideas of degrowthers, who literally have it as a goal to make humans poorer, and would get mass starvation if they achieved what they wanted. It seems hypocritical for the state to focus so much on the AfD when terrible ideas have strong representation across the political spectrum in Germany.

Everything is of course a matter of degrees. A party having one extremist somewhere is no justification for excluding it from government. If it is completely infiltrated up and down its ranks by such individuals, that’s more of a problem. With that in mind, we can consider the case of the AfD.

Assessing the Evidence

I asked Twitter about the evidence that AfD was fascist, and got a lot of responses on a thread that now has over 300,000 views. Here’s one of the particularly interesting responses I used as guides to look into the question.

We can begin with the history of the party to provide some context. The AfD was initially founded as a response to the Eurozone crisis. At first, the party focused on opposing the Euro and promoting neoliberal economic policies. Its initial leader was Bernd Lucke, a free market economics professor.

Angela Merkel’s decision to allow over 1 million refugees into Germany during the 2015 migrant crisis radically shifted the nation’s politics. AfD’s focus moved from economic policy to opposition to mass immigration and Islam. Its nationalist wing, led by Frauke Petry and Björn Höcke, gained influence by capitalizing on fears of cultural and demographic change. The July 2015 party convention saw Petry’s faction defeat Lucke, and she became co-chair of the AfD.

The transition into a more nationalist party has coincided with increasing electoral success. It went from getting 4.7% of the vote in the 2013 federal elections, to 12.6% in 2017 and 10.4% in 2021. The AfD is currently polling at around 21% in the upcoming election on February 23, which would be its best showing yet.

As it has transformed into a nationalist party, the AfD has had recurring problems with leading figures who turn out to have fascist sympathies or connections. For example, Andreas Kalbitz was a key leader in the AfD’s Der Flügel faction and the party’s Brandenburg branch. He was expelled in 2020 after revelations about his past ties to neo-Nazi organizations like the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend and attendance at extremist events. Despite his expulsion, Kalbitz remains influential in far-right circles and continues to shape nationalist politics in Germany. Kalbitz’s ideological allies within the AfD continue to advocate for his perspectives, contributing to ongoing internal debates and shaping the party’s direction. There was a similar controversy surrounding Wolfgang Gedeon, who was a member of the AfD in the Baden-Württemberg state parliament and got kicked out of the party in 2020 for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Björn Höcke is currently the party leader in Thuringia. He has been particularly vocal about redefining Germany's approach to its past. In a 2017 speech in Dresden, he criticized the country’s culture of remembrance, stating: “We Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.” He further called for a “180-degree change in our politics of commemoration,” suggesting a shift towards a more nationalistic perspective. He has described the influx of migrants as a kind of “national death through population replacement,” advocating for stricter asylum policies to preserve the nation’s cultural integrity. Höcke’s ideology can be described as explicitly anti-individualist and anti-liberal, with praise for national communities, collective identities, and all the other stuff that people say when they’re fascists but don’t want to just come out and admit it. He is also part of a New Right tradition in which German ethnic nationalism is seen as needing to be rehabilitated after being tainted by its association with the Nazis.

In 2021, Höcke got in trouble for using the phrase Alles für Deutschland (“Everything for Germany”), which was a slogan of the SA, and was fined 13,000 euros. For his part, Höcke denied he was aware of the historical context and the charges were based on a single speech.

If this incident stood alone, I’d be inclined to think that this is a bit paranoid. Nazis said a lot of stuff about being pro-German and sacrificing for Germany, a modern nationalist German party might do the same, and they might by coincidence end up saying some of the same words that came out of the mouth of Hitler or Goebbels. But in their January 2025 conference, the AfD chanted Alice für Deutschland in support of the party’s current leader. This indicates that AfD party members were aware of the controversy, and in a moment of exuberance did not mind sounding like Nazis. This could of course be a kind of trolling, where the AfD reacts to German suppression of speech by making a pun. Yet I think to dismiss it as trolling misunderstands what trolling actually is in contexts like this. If there’s anything we’ve learned over the years in our own politics, it’s that people who go around being racist “ironically” – to the extent that they have any politics at all and aren’t simply nihilists – are usually actually racist.

Here is a Der Spiegel article from 2023 that goes deep into some of the connections between the AfD and extremist parties and groups. Examples of what they found include:

• A man convicted of being a Neo-Nazi was working for an AfD member of the Bundestag. He was in a hiking group that was headed towards a former Nazi cult site.

• A local AfD official from Meissen attended the National Democratic Party (NDP) festival in 2023. The NDP is widely considered to be actually Nazi or Nazi-adjacent.

• The Young Alternative for Germany, the official youth wing of the AfD, sent out an invitation for a conference that included people with Nazi and Nazi-adjacent backgrounds.

• A man working for the AfD in the Brandenburg state parliament gave a lecture at a “Seminar for Right-Wing Metapolitics” that had among its attendees a man with an SS skull tattoo and a high-ranking member of Der Dritte Weg, a Neo-Nazi Party.

• The think tanks of the NDP and the AfD have spent decades working together and have social and professional connections.

You get the idea. Nothing in this article suggests that some high-ranking official is actually a Nazi. It’s more that Germany has fascists, and the social and professional networks of those fascists often overlap with those of people involved in the AfD.

More serious is a report from undercover researchers about a late 2023 conference near Potsdam that was a gathering of the far-right and included prominent members of the AfD. There, Martin Sellner, a famous identitarian activist, gave a speech on remigration, which included the idea of kicking out “non-assimilated” German citizens. After the talk, Gerrit Huy, an AfD member of the Bundestag, said that she agreed with him, and the reason her party doesn’t oppose dual citizenship anymore is that it can facilitate remigration, “because then you can take away the German one, and they still have one left.” As the report notes,

The events in the Potsdam hotel make clear how the strategies of various far-right actors and organisations intertwine. Sellner provides the ideas, the AfD politicians take them on and bring them to the party. Others in the background take care of the networking and bringing in wealthy sympathisers and supporters from the conservative middle-classes. And the debates always revolve around one question: How can a homogonous ethnic community be achieved in Germany?

Among the attendees was Roland Hartwig, a former MP who was then a personal aide to Alice Weidel. His professional relationship with her was terminated upon this revelation.

This Is More About Germany than the AfD

Overall, I think that the evidence suggests that the AfD is a mainstream conservative party across most of its top stratum, with fascist elements within its leadership and throughout the masses of its political activists.

Its platform is relatively mainstream as far as conservative parties go. Weidel, as mentioned, is a lesbian in a relationship with a non-white woman, and she has two adopted children. The idea that such individuals would want to return to the racial and sexual norms of Nazi Germany isn’t credible. That said, a lot of people in Germany are sympathetic towards Nazi- or Nazi-adjacent ideas. They believe in ethnic nationhood, think that the crimes of the Nazis were exaggerated, and want the government to reflect right-wing identitarian values. The other parties will not have them, but the AfD is more tolerant, so they naturally find a home there.

The party leadership realizes that it must appeal to such people to gain power, at the same time it needs to reach more moderate voters and not have the authorities shut them down. They therefore purge those who show too many signs of Nazi-adjacent sympathies, and continue putting forth ideas that remain within the window of legality while signalling to their base that they can be trusted.

Yet I think that the main problem the AfD has is that right-wing identitarianism just sounds scarier in German, and the political culture of that country has much less tolerance for dissent. When I read the ideas of Höcke, they often sound like those of a typical national conservative in the US. Yet when an American talks about national identity and honoring those who came before us, you know he’s not referencing Hitler. Some people are naturally inclined towards conservatism, but German political culture gives little outlet for those who do not want to make the Holocaust the center of their identity.

Imagine if the Republican Party could be banned or shut out of politics based on the same evidence and reasoning that is used against the AfD. There is no way it would survive. The Republican Party is a vast organization, and many of those involved with it have been shown to have connections to white nationalists, Nazis, and other extremists. It’s now a regular occurrence for people in Republican politics to be outed as Groypers or anonymous internet racists. Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar have spoken at Nick Fuentes’ America First conference. Stephen Miller used to go around sending journalists articles from VDare, which regularly published white nationalists, and Darren Beattie spoke at one of their conferences. Miller is now a top White House official, and Beattie has an interim position in the State Department. Germany has a state apparatus and independent antifa activists who go around looking for such connections, and if we had similar structures in our own country we certainly would find many more links between Republicans and various racist individuals and organizations.

Even putting aside lesser known figures, many of the stuff Trump says, like that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” sound more extreme than anything that is ever said by AfD leaders, and would probably get him investigated if he was a German politician. Moreover, the AfD has no history of election denial or trying to stage a coup in the way Trump did in 2020.

What all this means is that if you think the AfD should be banned or cordoned off from other parties, you probably need to argue that it would be fine for the same to be done to Republicans if our laws and political structures made such a thing possible.

Alexander Gauland, then co-leader of the AfD, was criticized in 2018 when he said that “Hitler and the Nazis are just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.” He is of course not saying here that Hitler was good. Rather, he thinks that modern Germany has placed too much emphasis on Nazi crimes in the context of his nation’s history. If an American conservative declares that we focus too much on our history of slavery, or a British conservative says that his nation pays too much attention to the crimes of colonialism, no one bats an eye. It’s the fact that we’re talking about Germany that makes a difference.

Such double standards might be in part justified. German history has included many remarkable individuals, yet I’m of the opinion that Germany itself we should be more ambivalent about. As I pointed out in my review of a biography of Bismarck,

Yet the ultimately self-destructive nature of this accomplishment serves as a kind of metaphor for the man himself. Only three generations passed between the establishment of Germany and the Second World War. Paul von Hindenburg rose through the army while fighting the wars of unification, and ended his political career as the last ruling Junker in 1934 by handing off the Reich Chancellery, the position that Bismarck had created for himself, to Adolf Hitler. As Steinberg wryly notes, Hindenburg’s “only reservation typically had to do not so much with Hitler’s policy but his rank. Hitler had been only a corporal and Hindenburg found that fact deeply distasteful.” It’s usually considered bad form to compare people to Hitler, but the connection is pretty direct in this case, and one almost has to be willfully blind to not see the link between the ideology of blood and iron and the might makes right philosophy of Nazism.

One could tell a story where, except for a few conflicts involving Russia or the Ottomans on the outskirts of Western Civilization, the major European powers could have avoided any large-scale wars for over two centuries, from the Congress of Vienna to today, had it not been for German aggression. Of course, this counterfactual story couldn’t be told with any degree of certainty, given all else that might’ve happened instead, but what we do know is that the existence of a united Germany was a prerequisite for the two world wars, while German division and pacifism has coincided with peace in Western and Central Europe.

The Nazis from this perspective were not a “speck” on German history, but the culmination of a century or more of a polity that had been too enamored with anti-liberal ideas.

But even if you agree with me about the German past, and its moral inferiority in relation to the Anglo-American or even French tradition, it’s far from obvious why that should have deep political lessons for today. We’re not talking about the glorification of Hitler or the celebration of the Holocaust here; current controversies are over whether German society should be constantly talking about its past in a negative light. Imagining that I’m correct that German political history doesn’t provide all that much to be proud of from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, should individual Germans be thinking about that on a daily basis when they’re deciding what to do about say immigration policy? This is something that is worth debating. Just because many people who think Holocaust remembrance has gone too far and Islam is incompatible with German culture are Nazis does not alone discredit these ideas, any more than it discredits the anti-DEI movement in America that it has the support of white nationalists.

It is true that the German government sometimes goes after left-wing extremists. A scandal broke out in 2012 when it was revealed that German intelligence was spying on dozens of Die Linke MPs. In 2013, this was ruled unconstitutional. Die Linke is also shut out of coalitions at the federal level. Nonetheless, much more of the energy of the political establishment goes towards policing the right. It is difficult to say whether that is justified, and most conservatives would probably argue that authorities have not gotten the balance correct. It should also be noted that anti-Zionist speech is heavily policed in Germany, and attitudes towards the Jewish state is a dividing line between the AfD, which mostly supports Israel, and some of its Nazi-adjacent allies, who are unsurprisingly not fans.

On identity issues, if not attitudes towards democracy, AfD is in a sense more fascist than Republicans, but this is probably due in part to the US having a two-party system. If we had a multiparty democracy, then perhaps the American right would be divided between a traditional Republican Party led by figures like Mitt Romney and Nikki Haley, and a more extreme party composed of MAGA/white nationalists/anti-vaxxers/conspiracy theorists. You would have a much stronger case for fascism among this imaginary MAGA party than the current GOP, but if you banned the MAGA party as a result or shut it out of governance, the left would dominate the country. There is simply no plausible right-wing movement in America, or Germany it seems like, without a lot of crazy people, and there is no way to lop off one side of the political spectrum without distorting all substantial debates we might hope to have.

Isolating Extremism Doesn’t Work, or Works too Well

I think that moves to ban or wall off the AfD reveal a too idealistic view of politics. From this perspective, there are bad people who are beyond the pale, and decent people of good faith can band together and make sure they should not have a role to play in our politics. While this might be workable in a society with a strong elite consensus around major issues, such a state of affairs doesn’t exist anywhere in the West today.

There are two potential problems with banning or isolating a party. The first is that this simply doesn’t work, and it just leads to more extremism. I’m actually skeptical this is the case, and tend to believe that any first-order effects of banning or isolating a political party or movement will usually trump higher-order effects like creating a backlash. The more serious danger, however, is that such repression will work too well, and you will end up with a political spectrum that is too tilted to one side.

Rightoids can be distasteful, but in modern democracies they serve as checks on the excesses of the left. When you repress them while letting the left run wild, you get something like pre-Elon Twitter or, well, modern Germany. This isn’t only about restrictions on speech. Even more concerning is the degree to which environmental extremists have gained control over public policy, making carbon-based forms of energy more expensive as they ban nuclear power. This is particularly ironic given that the AfD is often accused of being sympathetic to Putin, when it is the mainstream German parties that have made their country dependent on Russia. Household energy costs in Germany are almost twice what they are in the US, and the country is on track to see 2025 as the second straight year of zero growth. Many freedoms Americans take for granted are nonexistent in Germany. For example, homeschooling in all but the rarest cases is illegal.

It might sound insane to say that your politics needs to make an allowance for people who don’t think Hitler is all that bad in order to have sane energy policies, but this seems to be clearly true. Imagine a bizarro-world version of Germany, where everyone who said too many nice things about communism was hounded out of public life. Not only that, but any party that even made room for communist sympathizers, or those who might’ve once had an affiliation with communist groups, wasn’t allowed to be part of any governing coalition. It is obvious that the result of this would be to move public policy far to the right on a wide range of issues, not just those involving economics.

Germans are in an unfortunate position, in that they’ve developed a culture in which everything before 1946 is considered shameful. Skittishness towards political figures who seem too comfortable with Hitler is unquestionably justified. Yet that doesn’t mean that the practical answer to concerns about the past is to permanently hand over power to the left, which is what the German political establishment has decided to do. Racial collectivism should continue being treated as a threat, but that does not necessarily call for the AfD being permanently excluded from governing coalitions.

Isolating the AfD could be justified if there was a realistic chance of Germany slipping back into Hitlerism. Yet this seems quite unlikely in a system in which at most 25% of Germans vote for the AfD, and the other 75% are in favor of parties that refuse to even be in a coalition with it. If the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the mainstream conservative party, enters into a coalition with the AfD and that starts us on the road towards a Nazi resurgence, there will be many warning signs on the way.

This doesn’t mean that all elements within the AfD should be welcomed into normal politics. It would be reasonable for the CDU to say enter into a coalition with the AfD at the national level, but refuse to work with Björn Höcke’s party in Thuringia. Conservatives who believe in individual liberty and free markets can reasonably find some things in common with Weidel, but not far-right figures at home at NDP conferences. The national party’s hopes of entering into a coalition are why it polices its members in the first place, and more moderate factions within the AfD might benefit from the party being treated as mainstream.

In contrast, to begin with complete exclusion of the entirety of the AfD, based on the idea that certain figures within it are fascist sympathizers, is going too far. It restricts the spectrum of acceptable debate in Germany, and prioritizing the goal of excluding right-wing extremists above all else has made ruling elites turn a blind eye to more immediate threats to their society.